And you just know that somewhere there’s a pedo priest licking his chops. From Haaretz:

An ongoing child sex abuse scandal continues to rock the Melbourne Jewish community after a former security guard at an Orthodox Jewish school in the city was found guilty of child rape and multiple counts of molestation.

A jury at the County Court of Victoria last month found David Cyprys, 44, who worked at the Chabad-run boys’ school Yeshivah College, guilty of raping one boy five times between 1990 and 1991. Cyprys, who also taught karate at the school, pleaded guilty to abusing eight other minors during the 1980s and 1990s. He was convicted of indecent assault, gross indecency and attempted indecent assault for these offenses.

This factoid is especially rich: When the father of one of the raped boys went to the director of the school, Rabbi Yitzchok Dovid Groner, the man of God said there was no need to worry.

”He told me that [the boy] wouldn’t need counselling because [he] was under eight years old,” the [father] said in a statement. ”Rabbi Groner told me he had spoken to psychologists before and they had told him because the children are so young counseling would not be necessary. Since that day I never heard another word.”

In practice, that meant Cyprys was free to make more victims. Another parent who alerted Groner that her son had been abused by the child-rape fiend was told, “Oh no, I thought we cured him.“

…began showing up regularly at Wat Busayadhammavanara, a Buddhist Temple in White Settlement, Tex., a Fort Worth suburb. He had Thai friends, adored Thai food and said he always felt drawn to the culture, said Pat Pundisto, a member of the temple answering the phone there on Monday. He was a regular at Sunday services, intoning Buddhist chants and staying to meditate afterward.

31-year-old Brent Girouex was arrested on 60 counts of suspicion of sexual exploitation by a counselor or therapist.

The former youth counselor told police he did it to “help with homosexual urges by praying while he had sexual contact with [them].” He claimed the acts would give his victims “sexual purity.” …

Girouex is said to have told detectives “when they would ejaculate, they would be getting rid of the evil thoughts in their mind.”

The pastor is married and has four kids. He clearly takes his vows before God very seriously.

As is par for the course in cases involving clergy, Girouex won’t do any time behind bars.

Last week a judge handed down a 17-year prison sentence but promptly suspended it to allow Girouex to get sex offender treatment and probation. As long as Girouex doesn’t violate the terms of his probation, he won’t do any jail time.

What do you suppose the chances are of an openly secular youth counselor getting off with a mere slap on the wrist?

When Tennessee pastor Rickey Reed found he didn’t get high enough on opium for the masses, he decided to try illegally tripping on pain pills instead. And who better to steal them from than the people who trusted him with their eternal life?

A Smyrna pastor caught on tape trying to break into a church member’s home for drugs in 2011 has been arrested again after police say he burglarized the home of another former church member in Antioch.

Rickey Alan Reed, 56, remained jailed Tuesday on $32,500 bond in Davidson County on a single count each of felony aggravated burglary and misdemeanor theft under $500. He was already on probation after pleading guilty in 2011 to aggravated burglary in Rutherford County, avoiding a four-year prison sentence by begging a judge for mercy, forgiveness and a chance to treat his addiction.

But Jewel Proper, 70, said none of it worked. Instead she found him the morning of Aug. 8 standing in her Antioch home with her pain medication.

“I opened the back door and there he stood in the kitchen. I grabbed him by his shirt and I said, ‘I got you now, you ain’t goin’ nowhere,’ ” Proper said. “He kept saying, ‘Jewel, let me go.’ I said, ‘No! You stole my medicine.’ ” …

Reed was pastor of First Free Methodist Church in Smyrna until he was caught on video July 4, 2011, breaking into the home of Jean Harris, a member of his church. Harris turned the video over to Smyrna police, who have said they had seen similar allegations that he had broken into homes hunting for pain pills.

Las Vegas police officers have arrested a high-ranking Scientologist in a bizarre plot — allegedly inspired by right-wing “Sovereign Citizen” beliefs — to kidnap and kill a local law enforcement officer.

Devon Campbell Newman, 67 [picture], became the public relations director of Scientology’s “Celebrity Center” in Las Vegas, Nevada, early in 2010 and has remained in that position to the present day — that’s according to her own LinkedIn profile as well as numerous online records of her activities as a Scientologist. This week, she became known for something else. As a result of a police investigation that began in April, on Tuesday Newman and a six-time felon and registered sex offender named David Allen Brutsche, 42, were arrested for planning what police are calling a bizarre plot to kidnap and kill a random local police officer in a macabre publicity stunt to promote their “sovereign citizen” views.

The arrest and its strange details quickly made news yesterday, but Newman’s position with Scientology wasn’t mentioned. Then, last night, we were tipped by Las Vegas television journalist Nathan Baca about Newman’s role in the church. He plans to have a full report later today. But for now, we have some preliminary information about Newman’s Scientology career, and the trouble she currently finds herself in.

Two buses were stoned by a group of Haredim in Beit Shemesh on Wednesday after the police arrested a man and woman who had asked a female passenger to move to the back of the bus.

The incident began on a No. 497 bus from Beit Shemesh to Bnei Brak, which is run as a mehadrin line on which men and women sit separately. Under a ruling by the High Court of Justice in 2011, such seating is strictly voluntary.

According to passengers on the bus, one of the female passengers asked a woman who was sitting at the front of the bus to move to the rear. While the seated woman did not object, the driver — who heard the conversation — summoned police, who detained the woman who had made the request and her husband, and the bus continued on its way.

When news of the incident spread, groups of ultra-Orthodox youth stoned two local buses. Moshe Schuman was a passenger on one of them, the No. 417 from Ramat Beit Shemesh to Jerusalem.

“The bus was full because of the vacation,” Schuman said. “When the driver stopped at a stop, four people in Haredi dress blocked the bus’ path and began to bang on the windows with a hammer. The passengers got upset, there were people there with babies. The driver tried to flee the scene but he couldn’t because they were blocking the bus’ path. Only after they’d smashed all the windows and ran away was the driver able to drive to a safe spot.”

A Bolivian judge has ordered a 34-year-old priest jailed in the theft of the sumptuous collection of gem-encrusted gold jewelry that bedecked a statue of the country’s patron saint, the Virgin of Copacabana.

Also under arrest in the case is the female owner of a hostel where the Rev. Jesus Cortes was lodged when the jewels disappeared April 22 from the basilica in the town on Lake Titicaca’s shore.

The jewels removed from the statue, which was carved in 1580, are worth an estimated $1 million.

Cortes was arraigned Wednesday. He lives in the eastern city of Santa Cruz and was helping out while the church’s pastor was abroad.

Authorities say Cortes was the only member of the church staff who was not mysteriously tranquilized the night of the theft.

Leniency was on a judge’s mind in Grand Rapids, Michigan, yesterday. He ordered the defendants in the case to merely pay back the money they pilfered. No jailtime necessary.

I’m sure such a slight slap on the wrist has nothing to do with the divine calling of the accused.

Arthur Pearson, the fired former pastor of the Pilgrim Rest Missionary Baptist Church, and the removed church secretary Gerolanita Bailey, were told they have 48 months to pay back a combined total of more than $220,000.

Pearson is accused of taking some $167,000 that he used to give himself raises and bonuses of as much as $20,000. He used the church credit card for personal expenses at several area retail stores and restaurants, including the Electric Cheetah, Macy’s, Victoria’s Secret and Hearthstone Bistro, according to the Kent County Prosecutor’s Office.

Bailey used more than $60,000 in church money to pay utility and cable bills for herself and family members and wrote checks intended for personal use.

Among the allegations laid out following an audit of church finances was that Bailey diverted $6,100 to Comcast, $7,300 to Sprint, $10,000 for a Capital One credit card and about $18,000 taken in written checks to “cash” or herself. This embezzlement went on between 2008 and 2012.

Such representatives of God may well be accelerating the pace at which Americans identify as “nones” — having no particular religion.

The experience divided the Franklin Street SE church, causing membership to plummet and leaving the church without a full-time pastor for the last year and a half.

In 2009, when pastor Guadalupe “Lupe” Davila first ascended the pulpit of the Primera Iglesia Bautista Camino al Cielo, in El Mirage, Ariz., money and valuables started disappearing with vexing regularity.

Tens of thousands of dollars in cash, building materials, and new appliances for the church’s kitchen were donated. Even though he was asked repeatedly, Davila refused to provide records about how the money was spent.

A group of concerned church members finally did a little investigating the other day, rifling through Davila’s church office and packing up his belongings. They wanted him out.

A DVD showing a topless woman pressing her forearm and hand against her breasts fell out of a tome interpreting the Bible’s book of Revelations.

Church members and volunteers learned that Davila emptied nearly $3,000 in donations from a bank account established to improve the learning center for neighborhood children. They also learned that he used an invalid tax-exempt identification number to collect free food and other donations from local retailers, including Costco.

They discovered that Davila, a former Goodyear police officer, spent about five months in a federal prison for stealing about $6,000 from an undercover operation targeting drug dealers and gang members.

Could a crooked cop also be a crooked pastor? But, but — Davila is ordained! A man of the cloth! A follower of Christ! He would never violate his promises to the Lord!

Strike that.

Davila … carried on sexual relationships with at least two church members. One of the young women was his secret lover for about two years, but she ended the relationship after realizing he had other mistresses at the same time. When she broke things off and stopped attending church, Davila barraged her with calls, text messages, and e-mails.

Even after she obtained an order of protection against him, he sent her more than a hundred erratic texts — one minute telling her he missed her and that God loves her and the next calling her a “fucking bitch” and a “fucking liar.” In some, he wrote that he was “unsettled with remorse” and that he’d pray for her.

His congregation has now changed the locks as well as the name of the church; and Davila, with any luck, is going to spend some more time in prison to contemplate the similarities between being a peddler of religion and being a con man.

…an Islamic council … issued a fatwa last month ordering the immediate closure of all cosmetic shops in Deh Salah. The hard-line clerics argued that the sale of cosmetics was “un-Islamic” and the presence of the shops promoted adultery.

Most eye-popping passage from a recent Rolling Stonearticle about American Buddhist teacher Michael Roach:

To underscore the importance of one’s teacher, Roach’s acolytes consumed dutsi, pills that supposedly contain bits of symbolic scatological material going back to Buddha (a secretive practice among Tibetan Buddhist initiates). “People worked for free in order to catapult their karma out of the prosaic shitter,” says Morris [a source]. “So you had a lot of people eating shit, literally and figuratively.”

Wow. That’s some silly shit. Because I can’t resist a good poop joke, I have more about this at the Friendly Atheist.

NOTE: Moral Compass is a compendium of religious wickedness. All alleged violators mentioned in our posts are innocent until proven guilty in court.

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PAINE AND JEFFERSON ON RELIGION:

"It is impossible to calculate the moral mischief that mental lying has produced in society. When man has so far corrupted and prostituted the chastity of his mind, as to subscribe his professional belief to things he does not believe, he has prepared himself for the commission of every other crime." — Thomas Paine

"It does me no injury for my neighbor to say there are 20 gods or no god. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg." — Thomas Jefferson